Opinion: State should strengthen, not take over, local school committees

Benjamin Forman

Saturday

Mar 23, 2019 at 11:16 AM

A Twitter spat erupted last week when the Pioneer Institute suggested the state appoint members to school committees in urban districts. Fall River Superintendent Matt Malone’s heated tweets rejecting the idea are quite understandable. It would be odious to take political franchise from communities that have low tax bases, in large part because they allow for multi-family housing, while giving complete self determination to suburbs that maintain high tax bases by fiercely opposing attempts to build multi-family homes.

Pioneer floated this controversial idea as legislators on Beacon Hill debate ways to provide the state’s public schools with more funding. In return for additional dollars, Pioneer and others have called for schools to be more accountable for improving student achievement. Many in the trenches feel it’s the state that has been wholly unaccountable, failing year-after-year to provide its share of education aid and required charter school reimbursement funds.

The notion that urban districts will have to take on more layers of compliance just to get the state to pick up its fair share of the tab has tempers running hot, especially when the calls for more accountability often come from those with little direct experience in urban public schools. As someone who similarly lacks perspective on what Fall River educators face day-to-day, I appreciate that my view is limited, but I believe that Pioneer raises some important issues.

Accountability is vital to ensuring that taxpayer dollars deliver the best public education possible. And it’s not the state that provides the most important line of accountability, but rather our local governing bodies. However, instead of taking these boards over, the state should help strengthen them.

This begins with a focus on school councils rather than school committees. Every school in Massachusetts is required to have a school council under the state’s 1993 education reform law. Functioning school councils could provide excellent training grounds for those who want to be more involved in civic leadership. By design, they include lots of seats for both parents and community partners looking to lend their talents to school improvement, and learn more about governance through their service. While school councils are charged with developing strategic plans and overseeing their implementation, few have been nurtured and empowered to perform this essential function.

As a result, the strategic plans Massachusetts schools prepare today are anything but strategic. MassINC research shows that these plans don’t allocate resources to meet priorities, they don’t contain measurable goals to hold leaders accountable for results, and, perhaps most tellingly, they aren’t clear and accessible. This leaves parents with little grasp for what their schools are trying to improve upon, and how they can support the effort.

The same is equally true, or worse, when you look at school committees responsible for district-level strategic plans. School committees regularly fail to set priorities and establish measurable goals, which makes for a totally subjective process when it comes time to evaluate superintendents. In part, this is why relationships between school committees and superintendents sour, leading to unnecessary turnover and instability.

School committees struggle with strategic governance precisely because our school councils aren’t producing a leadership pipeline. For diverse cities like Fall River, this leadership void contributes directly to achievement gaps. Nearly half of Fall River students are nonwhite, yet there are no nonwhite members on the Fall River school committee. A mountain of evidence shows how this lack of representation harms students of color.

Pioneer’s provocative proposal draws much needed attention to these overlooked local governance challenges. But this neglect is at least partially due to the heavy focus Massachusetts has placed on state-level accountability, driven by Pioneer and other ed reformers, who lost faith that cities like Fall River could muster the will to improve on their own. After 1993, they pushed for a series of laws to establish targets for student achievement, along with mechanisms for the state to step in when schools repeatedly failed to meet them.

These accountability policies have shown that when you set goals and apply pressure, schools make progress. However, the experience also demonstrates the limits of state accountability. Standardized tests that allow the state to compare performance across all communities provide an incomplete picture of how well students are prepared to navigate the world. Gateway Cities like Fall River face intense pressure to narrow their focus to improving results on state tests. This is problematic: A passing MCAS score is not a passport to success.

Whether they enter the workforce directly or move on to pursue a college degree, students must emerge from K-12 with a broader range of skills. Building strength to govern from the ground up is the best way to ensure that Fall River students receive all of these learning experiences. The city’s other recent leadership challenges also beg for this capacity-building strategy. By drawing from models Gateway Cities across the state are beginning to employ, Fall River can prepare both students and parents for civic leadership, increasing its talent pipeline and paving the way for a future with more robust democratic institutions.

Benjamin Forman is research director at MassINC, a nonpartisan think tank based in Boston.

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